This Is All Yours

Alt-J's sophomore effort fails not because of hype or unfair standards but because it's dull and tuneless—a frustrating development for those who still believe in alt-rock as an incubator for unfashionable and undeniably great bands.

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Judging from Alt-J's 2012 debut An Awesome Wave, here are the minimum requirements to earn the "next Radiohead" tag: be a British band that likes guitars and computers. And yet, with few other groups seeking to fill the hungry post-The King of Limbs void, it was enough to convince the Mercury Prize committee and stateside radio programmers. Even though that record's gawky, akimbo singles recalled Thom Yorke’s “Lotus Flower” dance more than his actual music, it’s been a decade since Yorke and his team had a song that hit the American charts with the impact of “Breezeblocks” and “Tessellate”. If you’re surprised by Alt-J's rapid ascent, well, they are too; their sophomore effort, This Is All Yours, is the Peter Principle on wax, a record that's exactly what you’d expect from a band that finds itself at the top after failing upward and has no idea what their next step is.

This sense of paralysis similarly afflicted their debut, an album praised as “schizophrenic” and “ADD”, the same misdiagnosis given to deskbound people who just happen to be bored and overstimulated. Far more muted and placid than its predecessor, This Is All Yours more closely resembles passive-aggressiveness. On the otherwise cottonball-electro lead single “Hunger of the Pine”, a sample from Miley Cyrus’ “4x4” grinds awkwardly against lead singer Joe Newman. The lyric “I’m a female rebel” is a particularly juicy line of clickbait, as well as one that has nothing at all to do with anything Newman says on the rest of the song; French poet Alfred de Musset is also quoted, but unlike Cyrus, he didn’t have any choice in the matter.

Those are talking points on a song that otherwise would have none, but at the same time, “Hunger of the Pine”’s timeliness is unintentionally an aural thinkpiece on everything grating about Internet-era music consumption—performative poptimism, autoplay ads popping up in buried tabs, and a tidy narrative in which the Upworthy headline writes itself: “Alt-J Sampled Miley Cyrus and What Happened Next Will Surprise You.” Conor Oberst appears somewhere within the barren “Warm Foothills”, and you'll only know that if you read the credits. Oberst’s a slightly more corporeal presence on This Is All Yours than Dave Matthews (Newman‘s unctuous “hike up your skirt a little more” lyricism), Soul Coughing (the overbearing scare-quotes “quirkiness”), and every other piece of late-'90s college-alt from which Radiohead used to be a sanctuary.

Mallet percussion, multilingual lyrics, chesty vocal huffs, fumbled acoustics, roundabout vocal harmonies, tentative EDM dipping, Asian monasticism, "Rule Britannia", American gothic: they all get sucked into the vacuum of This Is All Yours without leaving an impression. “Intro” does what it’s supposed to, with a volley of vocal overlaps sliced and diced that reestablish Alt-J as more computer literate than their alt-rock peers but humane enough to escape the “electronic” tag. It takes about a minute and a half to get its point across, and then it goes on for twice as long, proving itself to be an introduction to another introduction; “Arrival in Nara” precedes “Nara”, which itself precedes the closer “Leaving Nara” and is even more indicative of the glassy-eyed robo-soul to come. Ten minutes pass on This Is All Yours with barely a pulse—it's possibly the most deflating post-hype re-introduction since “The Beta Band Rap”—but those guys were at least trying to chase off the squares.

The facepalm rhyming arrives later on This Is All Yours; Alt-J are guys who bonded in their college dorm, so naturally they’ve got their own coded sex talk. During An Awesome Wave, Newman sang, “In your snatch fits pleasure, broom-shaped pleasure/ Deep greedy and Googling every corner", (if you don't believe this actually happened, look it up), and who knows, perhaps quoting “Every Other Freckle” will get somebody laid: the options for pick-up lines include, “Turn you inside out and lick you like a crisp packet," “I’m gonna bed you like a cat beds into a beanbag,” and of course, "I want every other freckle", the last word of which Ben Gibbard has proven twiceover bears the least erotic phonetics in the English language. Later on, the L-shaped block of Tetris gets namedropped, and that's to say nothing of the hook, “Are you a pusher/ Are you a puller?" delivered in a barbershop harmony. Combined with the squawkbox honky blues of “Left Hand Free”, “Pusher” is a fair reminder that a Mercury Prize and some incompatible ideas about folk and electronic music only means you're that much closer to becoming the next Gomez.

Regardless, the issue with This Is All Yours has little to do with hype or unfair standards and everything to do with the album in question being really dull and tuneless—a frustrating development for those who still believe in alt-rock as an incubator for unfashionable and undeniably great bands. This Is All Yours is, however, interesting as a proxy for discussion about how this band has managed to achieve a level of success that’s escaped their far craftier, smarter and more accessible British peers like Bombay Bicycle Club, Wild Beasts, Foals—basically everyone but the 1975. To that end, it’s worth noting that This Is All Yours will likely take the #1 Billboard spot in the UK recently held by New Rock Revival revivalists Royal Blood—another act who's deferential to their lofty comparisons but will happily reap the benefits of alt-rock not being dead as long as bands are willing to contort themselves into familiar shapes. “The next Radiohead” remains Alt-J’s best hook, and they didn’t even come up with it.